


the fled & the fallen

by moonsandstar_s



Category: RWBY
Genre: volume 5 got me HYPE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-18 00:11:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12376971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonsandstar_s/pseuds/moonsandstar_s
Summary: It's already unfortunate enough that she's stuck with the drudgery of spying on the girl who used to be her only confidante in the White Fang, but Ilia is convinced  that if she puts her past with Blake on one side of the impending war in Remnant, and her own future on the other, the collateral damage will wreck more than Menagerie when it comes rushing through to destroy them both.It's easy enough to fight a battle when your enemy is a stranger. But weapons become betrayals when the eyes that look back at you from the end of the blade are the eyes you once trusted more than the rise and fall of the sun.





	the fled & the fallen

Naomi thinks there's an unfortunate lack of Ilia fanfiction, and I agree. Poor chameleon girl deserves some depth and attention from the fandom's more analytical minds.  
Also I know I said I was done with RWBY fanfiction (oops) but I was having writer's block on both novels I'm grappling with, so why the hell not get some words flowing that I know I can work with?  
Also also, I wrote this in like an hour and I'm really tired and it's Sunday at the end of a break, so my brain has entirely puttered out. I apologize for any general shoddiness. 

* * *

If there’s a way to punch someone through a Scroll, Ilia is determined to figure out how, because Corsac has been rambling on about her botched missions for a good hour now, and she won't be surprised if her ear falls to the ground due to his motormouth.  
  
“Are you listening to me, Sister Amitola?” Corsac snaps.  
  
“With a significant amount of regret, I can assure you.”  
  
“Dearest Amitola, please try to show your enthusiasm a little less strongly. You’re due at Master Taurus’ presence within the hour. Seeing as his patience wears thin, I would advise you to be punctual. There is no predicting the consequences should you dash through the bit of restraint he still exercises. Today is not a good day for him.”  
  
“I’m aware, Brother Albain. There never is a good one while the world doesn’t bow to his every whim, but I'm pretty sure I can handle whatever mood he decides to exemplify tonight.”  
  
“If you pull that tone with him, I would not be surprised to find you crawling out to your next spying mission with your fingers missing,” Corsac responds with evident relish, before a buzzing _click_ indicates their connection has cut off. Ilia pockets her borrowed Scroll with a scowl. It’s a horrible one, even less reliable than the shifting tide against Menagerie’s crowded shore. But her former Scroll is in Blake’s possession now—the best weapon she has against the White Fang, and not a very good one, at that. Shelving thoughts of the Scroll, Ilia examines her nails, shifts to readjust against the unforgiving trellises of bramble vines that seek out the tender spots of her exposed skin like moths flocking to an open flame, and curses every god she knows as she stares up at the manor of Menagerie’s master.  
  
She’s been out here spying on the place too long to be safe.  
  
Ghira, Kali, and that stupid monkey boy with the shirt fluttering in the open breeze—who she had been certain had sustained a fatal wound by her hand, but she must have missed, because she didn’t even see a scratch on his chest as he strode the front door like he owned the place—disappeared into the house a while ago. She’s not frightened because it’s, you know, Ghira’s palace and all—she’s no more timid of his presence than she would be of a mouse. Behind the façade of mountainous bulk, the shimmering armor plates of wrought steel and the permanent scowl etched into his rawboned face, he’s a soft man, the kind who steps down from his position when the army he’s commanding has grown too horrendous for him to direct with a clean conscience. He’s a man only fit for false power. She’s known him as the leader of the White Fang and then the deserter and now the chief of a parody island, rampant with racism in the fact of its own existence. How any Faunus can live in Menagerie and be content is beyond here. Every step she takes here is a reminder of her status in the world. She’ll never be equal in this place. It’s not a palace, it’s a prison cell.  
  
Anyways, it doesn’t matter. She’s not here for Ghira. Or to seethe over the life she leads, how she’s sitting here in the empty damp of the night forest and not in the warmth of the manors that she grew up in, trading lies for comfort. She’s here for Blake Belladonna—but Blake isn’t anywhere to be seen and Ilia’s miserably, miserably freezing and just wants to sit by a blazing fire with a bowl of something that doesn’t taste like char in her mouth and a tomorrow that doesn’t look so horribly bleak. Right now, she’s running up a loss on all the things she craves. If Blake really is here, she must have slipped into the house while Ilia’s eyes were turned away. She hasn’t seen hide nor hair of her ex-friend’s figure, and part of her is grateful for it. The sight of her is only a painful one nowadays.  
  
She’s taking so many stupid risks in Blake’s name. First, letting her get away on the rooftop a month past. Letting her escape with the Scroll, filled to the brim with information that could destroy this uneasy ceasefire lingering in the air right now, and aiming to kill that boy with her with an electric strike to his chest, how he so callously struck at her with a thousand festering memories of the schoolgirls who taunted her heritage. Fennec and Corsac know of her uncertain loyalties and despite being the stupid mice that they are, they won’t hesitate to hand over her crimes of betrayal and take their reprieve while she takes Adam’s fury.  
  
Ilia sees light flicker within the screen doors of the house, a long shadow falling through the thin paper, and she rises from the hollow in the damp grass. The constellations swim against a coalsmoke-black sky, throwing down just enough incandescence for her to see the trunk of a brindled tree. She swings herself up the northern side, off of the patches of lichen, slithering through a net of boughs before she pauses to wait on a branch that overhangs the balcony. Where Blake will doubtlessly come to stare out at Menagerie and brood over what she’s done and what is left to do, and, Ilia thinks with a selfish pain, to grapple with the stinging regret of her betrayal.  
  
They both know the White Fang has mutated far beyond its original purpose. It’s a hydra with a thousand slavering jaws, and because of this monstrosity, it has traveled fathoms away from redemption. But regardless of the environment that molded their futures—Ilia and Blake used to be closer than family. Closer than blood. And Blake fled without breathing a word of warning to her.  
  
She will never forgive her for running.  
  
As if on cue, the screen door creaks, and a familiar figure emerges, exchanging a few muted words with the slouching guard. Looking relieved to be able to head inside from the frigid claws of the night and thaw out in Menagerie’s grandest house, the opulent haven of Kuo Kuana, the guard nods to Blake before hopping back into the light and sliding the door shut behind her. The only light that illuminates her figure is the shrouded moon and the distant city lights, turning her hair to a fall of shimmering silver, her eyes a blank gray. It’s not hard to guess her reasons for being out here. Blake is a creature of habit. When she’s met with an obstacle, she seeks silence.  
  
“You really need better security,” Ilia says into the quiet, and drops from the tree. The balcony rail creaks under her weight before settling.  
  
Her expression betraying surprise before it freezes into fury, Blake stares at her, hand flying towards Gambol Shroud too fast for Ilia’s eyes to follow. Regardless, she isn’t thrown off-guard by the pure and acidic hatred seething in Blake’s eyes, the orange a shimmering overcast of flaring fire like the northern lights. Ilia’s never seen that disgust directed at anyone but Adam, and it agitates her to think that Blake has finally detached from her roots enough to despise them.  
  
“Stop,” Ilia tells her. Unnecessarily, of course, because Blake is too much of a sentimentalist to follow through with a blow that would truly hurt her. “I just need to talk.”  
  
Blake’s hand stills. Her voice is another unseen shadow gliding through the dark. “How could you take the fall for them, Ilia?”  
  
“Blake—”  
  
“Be quiet.” Her ears flatten atop her skull, and she launches right into the tirade Ilia can see bubbling on her lips without pausing to consider the words before they’re out. “Corsac and Fennec _blamed_ you! We confronted them tonight, and they denied knowing anything and everything we found on your Scroll—they, they talked about how—how disappointed they were to hear that you’d sided with Adam.” She’s winding herself into a frenzy, voice overwrought with a hypnotizing mixture of anguish and loathing. “But you and I both know they’re guilty, you _know_ it. They deserve the shot, but you’re taking the bullet. How could you do that? For those cowards!”  
  
Between the narrow slats of her mask, Ilia glares out at her former friend. How is she here? What ensnares her? Blake’s matchbox smile that rings so many chords within her that she’s never been able to properly replicate in other harmonies she’s tried to design? The way she breathes, moves, lives? She could simply just run, take a page out of Blake’s book, and leave her to suffer the consequences. But all she manages to say is, “You can’t _prove_ anything.”  
  
Blake doesn’t look convinced. “Right. That Scroll might not have been enough to lock them up. But it’s plenty to sway the Faunus here. When we go public tomorrow, they’re not going to stand for any of it.” She exhales heavily. “And neither should you.”  
  
Does she truly not see what’s going to happen if she does this? This plan is never going to turn out as she likes. You can’t predict a crowd’s reaction, even less a crowd who is well used to cruelty and horrid betrayals. They’re not going to believe that another one is on its way—that the bloodiest war they’ve ever seen is looming just on the horizon. Blake will be ostracized, even more than before. She’s about to strike a blow in favor of Adam, and she doesn’t even know it. “Blake, it’s not going to work,” Ilia replies, a hint of desperation creeping into her voice. “Please—just leave Menagerie before it’s too late. You mustn’t—”  
  
“I’m not playing into your game,” Blake snaps, turning away, always turning away, before she strides into the gathering shadows, “and as for leaving here, you must think I’m dense to listen to you—you’ll have to drag me out kicking and screaming.”  
  
“I know,” Ilia murmurs to her back, and the trouble is that she does know. The problem is that, while Blake is an idealist, she’s not the kind that most people are. Most maintain a false dream that crumbles like the first ice of winter, when met with tribulation. Most people are idealists until it is inconvenient to be one any longer. Not so with Blake. She could stare reality’s bleakest features right in the eye and still not lose a shard of faith in her distant goal. She was, and is, the type that can start a war and end it on her own terms. Blake is a hurricane waiting to happen. Put under the right conditions, and her destruction is unpredictable, uncontainable.  
  
And it is this trait that makes Adam so desperate to obtain her light—to hold it in his hands and twist it into blackened cruelty to suit his own means before he crushes it underfoot. If it comes to an out-and-out war between the two of them, Ilia hasn’t a godsdamned clue who will come out on top. It takes more than brute strength to snatch victory from the jaws of a revolution.  
  
If Blake wasn’t such a huge threat, Ilia would have already put a bullet through her temple. She would be expendable—she _used_ to be expendable, back when she was just Blake, the poor Faunus girl whose parents were the ex-leaders of the Fang, who was an orphan by choice, who was Adam’s shadow and inferior in every way. But she’s swiftly becoming more than what she used to be, the troublesome pest nagging the White Fang with her stupid human team, to boot—and turning into an armed hunter with arrows and guns, intent on tracking it down and ripping out its throat. She’s not going for the brain of the White Fang, Sienna Khan and all of her chilly majesty, but rather, she’s intent on snuffing out Adam’s life: the soul of the White Fang, a bloodied and ruined wreck. He’s cold as clay, born with the analytical brain and the _human_ capacity for cruelty—something that the Faunus and their counterparts share—but he’s conspicuously lacking in the characteristic that Ilia believes sets apart men from monsters. Mercy. The word is probably foreign to him. “If that’s what it takes, if I must remove you from Menagerie without your willingness—”  
  
“I _can’t_ leave Menagerie, Ilia,” Blake repeats, staring at her hand, curling it into a fist. “I won’t. You don’t understand. This is the last safe haven I have.”  
  
Ilia hisses between her teeth. “Stop being such a _fool_ , Blake. You’re in more danger here than anywhere else, and if you fled to somewhere safer, like Mistral—”  
  
_“I can’t leave Menagerie!”_ Blake snarls, whirling on her. “It’s not that Vale is plagued with Grimm or the other kingdoms are locked up with embargoes and restrictions. None of those would stop me, and they couldn’t hope to stop Adam. This island is the farthest from all lands in Remnant. It’s the last isle where safety is more than a frail chance.”  
  
“I know you by many names, Belladonna,” Ilia snaps right back, “coward, and traitor, and warrior—but never by one that says you care more for your own safety than your misguided fight for the Faunus here.”  
  
Blake laughs, a harsh, mocking sound like a wolf’s guttural growl. “It’s not for my own safety I’m exiling myself. I wouldn't expect you to understand reasons that don’t stink of selfishness.”  
  
Ilia lowers herself, palms against the splintery wood, feet dangling into the open air. It’s a vulnerable position, one that will cost her valuable seconds if Blake tries to attack her. “Then _help_ me understand. Whose safety could possibly cause you to impose ostracizing yourself in this mockery of a civilization?”  
  
“People who I cannot name,” Blake says, “because you embody a portion of the danger that threatens them. But they exist. And my presence would only bring them more grief than it already has. Seclusion is the only option left.” She scrubs a hand over her tired face, lines creasing her brows. “Gods. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. Not after what you’ve done.”  
  
“I won’t breathe a word of it to Sienna Khan, or the Albain brothers—”  
  
Blake’s expression shifts to something sharper, more alert, like a cat’s ears pricking, eyes going to slitted pupils. “And Adam? What will you say to him?”  
  
“Hardly a word that you have. Not that I expect you to believe me.”  
  
Blake eyes her suspiciously. “You want my good faith? In _your_ words? Then be honest, Ilia. For once. Let the truth pass through your lips instead of forgery. What comes next if I refuse to leave Menagerie?”  
  
“You aren’t going to leave this cage of an island, you say,” Ilia whispers into the sighing night. “But you cannot hide from war, Blake. It will find you, by the bullets and by blood. And if I have to be the one who drags you into the crossfire, I will do it.”  
  
Blake sits on a fancy chair, crossing her legs across the seat like a child, but the expression on her face is watchful, burdened. Not the face of the child she once was. The child Ilia knew so well. “Well, that’s one way to be honest, isn’t it? I suppose a threat can be synonymous with truth.”  
  
“You want what’s real,” Ilia replies. “I can’t make it more honest than that, Blake. If you insist on making an enemy of the White Fang, they won’t let you walk away alive. And if you insist on making an enemy of me, I can’t give you a kinder promise of tomorrow’s contents.”  
  
“No,” Blake whispers. “You can’t.”  
  
Ilia doesn’t know what makes her say it—it sounds too much like a reprieve to be forgivable, to align with the façade of controlled cruelty she’s so carefully been portraying—but it’s out before she can stop it. “Let me ask you one question. Before I have to go.”  
  
“Back to the White Fang?” She laughs soundlessly. “One question. And the potential for infinite harm. What else do you want that you haven’t already made perfectly clear?”  
  
“Why did you leave Adam?”  
  
Blake’s chin snaps up, her eyes darkened with shadows of exhaustion, but they’re furious, blurred with livid tears. _“What?”_  
  
Ilia hastens to add, “I know he is not kind. I know his ideas are wrong. But for you to flee instead of remaining on his side to soften his temper, to exert your influence where it could be the most effective—”  
  
“I know you’ve been spying on me for ages, Ilia,” Blake interrupts flatly. “I wouldn’t doubt if I looked back in memory and saw your eyes gazing out from every concealed shadow, reporting my every move back to Adam. It’s how he knew where to find me the night everything changed. It’s how he knew all the right words to say to get me right where he wanted me. But tell me, were you watching at the Fall?”  
  
“Of course I was watching. I had no choice.” Shame heats her ears like a searing summer sun, touches a hot hand to her cheeks. She can feel herself turning from gentle brown to an agitated crimson, color spilling across her skin like lava, spots flushing across her forearms. “But I didn’t involve myself in the battles. I shed no blood that night. There was already enough of it spilling over the cobblestones. But I was there. I saw the knights, the corpses of the children, the White Fang running through the rubble… kings at last, the conquerors of a land that had no subjects left to subjugate.”  
  
_“Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant,_ ” Blake says softly. “They make a desert and call it peace. Why do you think I left him—and all of the Fang, for that matter? Our world should not be a desert where the Faunus struggle to survive on humanity’s remnants. Nor should it be a false paradise where Faunus are confined to a single, tiny island, and the humans struggle to survive in four other kingdoms while we’re holed up in a monotonous isle. I’m fighting for the middle—where we fight together—and yet you blindly still insist that the extreme is the only option that’s feasible, that’s right.”  
  
“Adam wouldn’t have stabbed you if you had _stayed,_ ” Ilia snaps. “None of what befell both of us would have happened if you hadn’t run away! That girl wouldn’t have gotten mutilated like she did if she hadn’t crossed into his path to save you. I’ve _tried_ , Blake, but don’t you understand? You say I’ve taken the fall for the Albain brothers, yet if you stay in Menagerie, it will happen to you again and again. First I took the fall for you when you fled the Fang, and then the girl with the gold hair fell to Adam, and then the Faunus boy to me—”  
  
Blake’s smile is faint, but it sends a chill through Ilia’s blood. There is something twisted about it, like a person encased in ice. _“You_ claim that you’ve taken a heavy loss? But you’re standing in front of me. Sun is on his feet. Ready to fight the Fang as earnestly as it should be. And Yang—” Ilia sees a crack in that carefully perceived expression, a thawing of that controlled ice. “If I ever knew her at all, she will have risen again. Hating me, hating Adam… but she will not have fallen forever. You don’t understand the logic behind the running, Ilia, and you never will. There are things you do to survive, things you will never forgive yourself for, things that will keep you staring awake with only taunting thoughts for company, things that you cannot bear but you must bear anyways because the alternative, to give up, is too horrible to contemplate.” She turns away, head bowed. “Life is merciless. Adam took a page out of its book. But we all have to keep our heads high and sustain hope because no matter what we are, human or Faunus, young or old, cruel or kind… we cannot bear the unknown.”

  
“Blake—”  
  
“Get out of here, Ilia,” Blake spits. “Hide in the trees, or watch from the shadows, but stay there. Let the shadows rule you all your life instead of finding your way out of them. Don’t imagine that I forget who I was, or who you were, or who we were to each other. I don’t hate you because I know we’ve both been scarred by the life we led together, and that experience is something that turned me into one person while it turned you into another.” Blake stands only a few feet away, her feet spread apart, planted firm on the ground. The wind tosses her hair into the gust, like a live thing, a black scattering of feathers. “Despite your lack of reserves, despite the fact that you might do it without a second breath—I cannot raise a hand to hurt you, Ilia. I _will_ not. But if it is you on one side of this war and me on the other, don’t expect me to relent. Don’t expect mercy from me when you refused to ever show me the same.”  
  
Ilia rises, the wood bowing beneath her feet, and casts a glance back. Blake cuts a peculiar figure against the night. She’s a hurricane, the war waiting to be declared—but she’s distant now, a stranger still. Ilia isn’t sure what the future holds for the both of them, but she doesn’t like the prospect of it.  
  
“I’ll see you on the lands outside of this island, Blake,” Ilia says softly. “And you had better pray to your gods that mercy does not make a fool of you when it comes.”  
  
She steps out over the edge and lets herself drop down into the gullet of the shadows, into the whispering rush of the night, into nothing at all, with only her past above and a bleaker tomorrow below.


End file.
